Working Papers
The incidence of affirmative action: Evidence from quotas in private schools in India (with Mauricio Romero)
Latest version; June 2023
The incidence of redistributive policies is central to whether they meet their stated goals. We study this in the context of one of the world's largest affirmative action programs in schooling: a 25% quota in all Indian private schools for students from disadvantaged groups. We use lottery-based estimates to show that, although students admitted under the quota attend more expensive and preferred schools on average, the distribution of program benefits is very regressive. Program applicants are concentrated among more-educated and better-off households. Consequently, 7.4% of the program spending accrues to the bottom socioeconomic quintile, compared to 24.3% to the top quintile. In total, two-thirds of the per-child cost of a quota seat is inframarginal for school choice. We use rich survey data to show that low application rates for poorer children are not driven by preferences and beliefs. Instead, information constraints and application frictions appear to be key. Finally, we use a randomized intervention to confirm the importance of these frictions and further demonstrate that alleviating a single constraint (e.g., information) may not reduce regressive selection, even if it boosts application rates substantially. Our results demonstrate how constraints facing potential applicants can make redistributive policies regressive in practice. Appropriate policy interventions must consider the joint incidence of these constraints to reduce regressivity.
Improving Public Sector Management at Scale: Experimental Evidence on School Governance in India (with Karthik Muralidharan)
Latest version: March 2023
NBER Working Paper (Nov 2020); (Slides)
We present results from a large-scale experimental evaluation of an ambitious attempt to improve management quality in Indian schools (implemented in 1,774 randomly-selected schools). The intervention featured several global “best practices” including comprehensive assessments, detailed school ratings, and customized school improvement plans. It did not, however, change accountability or incentives. We find that the assessments were near-universally completed, and that the ratings were informative, but the intervention had no impact on either school functioning or student outcomes. Yet, the program was scaled up to cover over 600,000 schools nationally. We find using a matched-pair design that the scaled-up program continued to be ineffective at improving student learning in the state we study. We also conduct detailed qualitative interviews with frontline officials and find that the main impact of the program on the ground was to increase required reporting and paperwork. Our results illustrate how ostensibly well-designed programs, that appear effective based on administrative measures of compliance, may be ineffective in practice
Myths of Official Measurement: Limits to Test-Based Education Reforms with Weak Governance
Latest version: Nov, 2023 (with Petter Berg)
Assessment-led school reforms are the central pillar of policy packages recommended to address low student achievement in developing countries. We study the effectiveness of such a reform that has tested over 6 million students annually since 2011 in a large Indian state. First, we use direct audit evidence to assess truthfulness. Comparing responses to the same test questions by the same students shows a doubling of reported achievement in administrative data versus independent tests. We show that this difference is due to cheating and is lower in grades with multiple test booklets and external grading. Ordinal information on school rankings is preserved despite manipulation but, despite stated policy goals, we find no evidence that classification into lower letter-grades led to improvements in monitoring, school functioning or student achievement. Overall, in contexts with weak governance, interventions relying on test-based accountability appear unlikely to succeed without complementary investments to assure data integrity.